Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior

Introduction

Every market, very product launched or introduced in that market, all the advertisement in the print and the electronic media and all the effort done by the sales sector of an organization or company are all for the sake of providing a product or service to the customer that they will like, use and continue using. Therefore, for a marketing firm, a customer is God. Moreover, a customer is always right. Without their customers and clients, no company or organization will be able to achieve their goal of selling successfully their product or services and collecting decent revenue for further production. Therefore, any company or organization cannot neglect their customers and their choices.

Discussion

Definition

The study of the phenomenon that includes the customer and the constantly varying trends and patterns adopted by them as the environment and situations around them varies is known as Consumer behavior. Many companies throughout the world observe this behavior shown by the consumer and adopt and change their marketing strategies accordingly (Farhar and Collins 2002). Therefore, this aspect holds the central position in any marketing firm.

Several Aspects of Consumer Behavior

There are several aspects included under the radius of behavior of a consumer. Some of them include attitudinal, cognitive, behavioral and environmental aspects.

Attitudinal Aspect

Attitude of a customer basically refers to his beliefs towards a product or a service and the behavior he chooses to show his appreciation or disapproval of the product. The beliefs may be ethical, moral cognitive, behavioral or environmental (Lawson and Glowa 2000). Therefore, a marketing firm before launching its product or service must make sure that the product or service coincides with the following requirements.

Cognitive Aspect

Cognitive is the most essential and important aspect. This aspect provides the very basis to the customer to first distinguish a product as a luxury or necessity on the basis of his economic constraints and limitation. Once approved as affordable by a customer, the further factual characteristics that are closely followed by a customer includes worth, quantity, size, relative pricing with respect to the same object from other competitors and the modifications made in the previous design of the product from time to time (Farhar and Collins 2002).

Behavioral aspects

The behavioral aspects of a customer that are to be considered by a company include his varying choices and his mood swings towards any particular product or service. For example, sometimes because of a fault in a particular product, sometimes inefficiency by any service providers, sometimes the natural desire of change in humans and sometimes because of no rational reason, a customer may deviate from using a product from any particular company and shifts his loyalty to some other brand (Lawson and Glowa 2000). The possibility also exists of the customer refraining completely from the use of a particular product at all.

Environmental Aspect

The behavior of a consumer towards a particular product on the basis of exterior factors and changes comes under the category of Environmental aspects. Weather is the best example of the environmental ...